Ronald Binge – Elizabethan Serenade
An evening pause: To commemorate the passing of Queen Elizabeth today.
Category: Behind The Black
September 8, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of string Jay:
- Rocket Lab’s next launch set for September 14, 2022
- Construction images of new launchpad at China’s coast Wenchang spaceport
- Engineers begin fueling the next manned Soyuz capsule, set to launch September 21st
- Russian design bureau submits its proposal for Venus lander, to launch in 2029
The press kit [pdf] says nothing about any attempt to recover the first stage.
This pad is intended to serve China’s pseudo-commercial rocket companies, thus isolating them from the government’s other higher security military and manned missions.
The mission will carry two Russians and one American, the American’s flight part of the new barter deal with Russia whereby each nation flies an astronaut on the other’s spacecraft.
As reporter Anthony Zak correctly notes, the “budget and timeframe for the project look dimmer than ever.”
Today’s blacklisted American: Modern Hollywood now celebrates McCarthyism and blacklisting
The modern dark age: Despite a history during the 1950s McCarthy era, when many of its most talented members were blacklisted because of their leftwing political beliefs, Hollywood today celebrates and encourages the blacklisting of conservative talent.
Consider the blacklisting described by comedian Adam Carolla and late night Fox show host Greg Gutfield during one recent podcast:
“Oh, we can’t get the guys who wrote on ‘Conan’ to come into the writers’ room because they’re scared of being blackballed. It drives me insane that they never stop complaining about McCarthyism and they’re more than happy to blackball anybody who crosses the line,” Carolla said.
“They’re the new McCarthy-ites, especially in this woke culture,” Gutfeld said. “I’m counting on this show succeeding without names and creating our own celebrities, which is actually what happens at Fox.”
Both men also described how, even if a writer or performer wanted to work for them, they often backed out because their agent or publicist told them not to, either because of the same fear or because of hostility to their politics.
In addition, Carolla in a different podcast described how this same blacklisting culture is now being used not just against conservatives, but against those who refuse to bow to the absurd COVID edicts.
The story of one actor, Clifton Duncan, is typical.
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September 7, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Russia confirms Luna-25 delayed till next year
The landing zone for Luna-25 at Boguslawsky Crater
The head of Roscosmos, Yury Borisov, confirmed yesterday that the launch of Russia’s first lunar science probe since the 1970s has been delayed until 2023.
The Doppler speed and distance sensor made by the Vega Concern owned by the Rostech State Corporation, that could guarantee a soft landing, underperformed in terms of measurement precision, a source in the space industry told TASS in July. The launch will likely be postponed until 2023, the source added.
Russian sources had indicated in July that this delay was likely. Yesterday’s announcement merely made it certain.
This project has been under development for almost a quarter of century, which appears to be the average development time for government-run projects, whether in Russia or in the U.S. Just long enough to provide an almost entire career for bureaucrats.
Lawrence of Arabia
An evening pause: I have posted scenes from this film twice (both sadly gone now from youtube), but I think the trailer sells it well. This movie remains one of the greatest made in the history of film. If you haven’t seen it, you must. Though its facts are of course not entirely accurate, its sense of the history, culture, time, and the political machinations going on in Arabia during World War I are spot on. The visuals, acting, and script (by Robert Bolt) are also magnificent.
It also speaks to the Middle East we see today, and helps explain why the Arabs have so far not really done well with the advantages of western technology.
Hat tip Tom Wilson, who says he makes it a point to watch this epic at least once a year.
Arianespace’s Ariane-5 rocket launches communications satellite
Arianespace today used its Ariane-5 rocket, launching from French Guiana, to successfully place a Eutelsat communications satellite into orbit.
This was the fourth successful launch this year for Arianespace, so Europe still does not make the leader board. The company had predicted it would launch eleven times in 2022. At this moment it appears very questionable it will be able to match that prediction.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
40 SpaceX
36 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 55 to 36 in the national rankings, but is now tied with the entire world combined 55 to 55.
Axiom chosen by NASA to build first Artemis moonsuits
Capitalism in space: NASA today awarded Axiom the contract to build the moonsuits the astronauts will use on the first lunar landing of its Artemis program, dubbed Artemis-3.
After reviewing proposals from its two eligible spacesuit vendors, NASA selected Axiom Space for the task order, which has a base value of $228.5 million. A future task order will be competed for recurring spacesuit services to support subsequent Artemis missions.
The contract award continues NASA shift from its failed spacesuit effort — taking fourteen years and a billion dollars to produce nothing — to hiring the private sector to do it.
Previously NASA had awarded contracts to both Axiom and Collins Aerospace to build spacesuits, either for spacewalks or on the Moon. Today’s award is specifically for moonsuits for that first lunar mission.
Ingenuity completes 31st flight
Click for interactive map
Though no details have yet been released, the engineering team for the Mars helicopter Ingenuity has posted the numbers for the helicopter’s 31st flight, which took place yesterday.
Ingenuity flew 318 feet to a height of 33 feet for 56 seconds. The maximum ground speed was 10.6 mph. The white dot on the map to the right indicates the approximate landing spot. The blue dot Perseverance’s location as of September 3rd.
The flight plan had been to fly 319 feet, so Ingenuity landed one foot short of that plan.
That difference does not indicate any problems. However, one of the present goals of the engineering team is to improve their landing accuracy in order to provide data for the future sample return helicopter that is now in development to come and get Perseverance’s sample cores. That future helicopter will need to be able to land very precisely, and they are using Ingenuity to refine the Martian flight software.
An example of the youngest big lava flow on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo above, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on May 13, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows two dramatic ancient flows of flood lava. The arrows indicate what I think is the direction of flow for each, though the direction of the flow to the north appears more certain. In a wider context camera image the bulk of the evidence suggests the southern flow is heading west (as indicated by the arrow), but there are scalloped mesas within it that suggest the opposite.
The overview map above marks the location of this picture by the white cross inside the Athabasca Valles flood lava, thought by some scientists [pdf] to be Mars’ youngest major lava event that erupted about 600 million years ago and in just a matter of a few weeks poured out enough lava to cover an area about the size of Great Britain.
The general trend of the Athabasca flow was to the south, splitting into a big western and southeastern flows. This picture captures the southern edge of that southeastern flow, which might help explain why the flow directions in the picture seem so different from the main Athabasca flow. On a large scale, the flow was to the southeast. On a small scale at the edges the flow could go in many directions as the lava looks to find its level.
The Medusa Fossae Formation is the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars, and is thought to be the source of most of the red planet’s dust. Though the origin of the ash is not yet known, it likely came from the eruptions that formed the planet’s giant volcanoes to the east and west.
1-in-5 Democrats and 1-in-3 women Democrats think men can get pregnant
The uncertainty of science? An online survey has found that large numbers of self-described Democrats now believe that it is possible for a man to give birth to babies.
The online survey, conducted by WPA Intelligence from August 22-25, found 22% of Democrats agreed with the statement, “Some men can get pregnant.” The percentage rose when only including women, and a whopping 36% of white, college-educated female Democrats concurred. [emphasis mine]
There is no uncertainty here. Men cannot get pregnant, and to believe it is possible tells us that you are either insane, or utterly disconnected from the real world.
The highlighted words underline the madness that is overtaking our intellectual upper classes. More than one-third of college educated Democrat women believe this. No wonder these same people wear masks, get triple and quadruple COVID jabs, and want any evidence that they are wrong censored with the speakers blackballed. They have become so divorced from reality that to even let a peep of it enter their brains will cause their heads to explode.
Pushback: Libs of TikTok threatens Twitter with lawsuit if banning continues
Twitter: Home for censorship.
Bring a gun to a knife fight: After getting suspended again by Twitter for merely proving that Boston Children’s Hospital was doing sex change operations on children, Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik had her lawyers send the social media company a letter threatening a lawsuit if the suspension was not lifted immediately.
As she notes,
Last week, I was wrongfully suspended from Twitter for seven days after I exposed a hospital that admitted to performing gender-affirming hysterectomies on healthy minors. I say “wrongfully” because the reason given for my suspension was hateful conduct. I did not engage in hateful conduct. I accurately reported the truth
In their letter Raichik’s lawyers made it clear [pdf] that nothing she did was hateful. If anything, her actions caused others on Twitter to spew hate at her. As the lawyers noted also,
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